While attention is focused on the Fourth Annual Conference of the National Palestine Solidarity Movement at Duke University this weekend, an event that will be a training session for college activists nationwide to work to destroy Israel and oppose US forces in Iraq, a similar smaller event took place last Saturday in San Francisco. That anti-Israel event was organized by allies of the Palestine Solidarity Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area who operate under the umbrella name of International A.N.S.W.E.R., a communist front group. The conference was given for those people who could not make it to the event at Duke University. Front Page Magazine’s Stop the ISM squad was there to report what went on inside. Below is a report from Adam Balling, who attended the event, held on public property:

On last Saturday, October 2, 2004 an estimated forty patriotic demonstrators showed up across the street from San Francisco’s taxpayer-supported Horace Mann Middle School and opposed a pro-terrorist festival being held there. The event inside the school celebrated the fourth anniversary of the Al-Aqsa Intifada against Israel that resulted in over 1,000 people murdered in cold blood. The sponsors, led by International A.N.S.W.E.R., this time calling themselves the Justice in Palestine Coalition, defined themselves as a "group of progressive organizations" consisting of Marxist-Leninist parties whose intent is to form a popular front against the West and Israel.

One of the key groups present was the International Solidarity Movement, the PLO’s civilian foreign legion. ISM members travel to Israel posing as tourists and obstruct the Israeli Defense Forces fighting terrorism. They are voluntary human shields for Palestinian rioters and terrorists, and an unacceptable security risk that has been ignored all too long by the Israeli government. Also of note, staff from the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, such as board member Jess Ghannam, played a major organizing role in this conference. The event openly called for supporting the insurgents in Iraq who kill U.S. soldiers, as well as every totalitarian dictatorship from North Korea to Cuba.

The proceedings were a perfect study in how such groups use "anti-war" movements as a cover to aid violent revolutionaries and sabotage the security of liberal democracies. The event was also an example of how such sham-liberation ideologues practice authoritarian censorship whenever they are in power, even for an afternoon. Though the event was pitched to the San Francisco Unified School District as an "educational forum on the Middle East," it advertised itself as "The Struggle for Palestine: 4th Anniversary of the Intifada" and refused admission to all of the known pro-Israeli individuals who had come to observe what was being discussed. Investigative journalist Lee Kaplan was barred because he was a Jew who has exposed these groups in the past. When asked by TV reporters why they barred him, the organizers claimed on camera that children might be put at risk, a joke at best.

However, I did attend this event undercover as a member of the Stop the ISM squad organized by Front Page Magazine and know there were no children inside. Instead, there were hordes of Baby Boomer 1960s leftover radicals—perpetually seeking "revolution"—and their young adult imitators. They came in many political stripes: anarchists, Greens, communists, anti-Semites and even a few of San Francisco’s street denizens.

This convention was a fine Orwellian display, complete with doublespeak, ritualized hatred, and the policing of "thought crimes." All who disagreed openly were barred from the radical teach-in at the public school. I was only there because I went in "under cover." That the San Francisco Unified School District rented its space to an exclusionary meeting of terrorist-supporting fanatics—in violation of state and federal laws, and possibly the USA PATRIOT Act—defies description. These people want America destroyed, and are not shy about it.

On my arrival, one registrar was taking in cash, for which no receipts were furnished, and suggested a monetary "donation" that could conceivably be sent overseas to aid terrorist groups. I plead a lack of cash and said I would be happy to visit the relevant free websites instead, but fearing a lost potential supporter, the registrars unwittingly waived my fee so I could infiltrate. The following is a record of what was discussed inside at their workshops:

TARGETS OF EMPIRE AND CRIMES OF THOUGHT: Manila, Mindanao and the Maoists

As I joined the "Targets of Empire" workshop already in progress, I heard an endorsement of the Philippines’ Maoist New People’s Army and its front allies. The young Filipino-American leader claimed that his motherland was still under not only "American puppet rule, but outright colonial settlement." He claimed the native population had "settlers in the brain," so that actual natives "don’t even need to be there." Like the Palestinians, the Filipinos deserved "a right to return to a land that is sovereign" even though they have never been displaced. Painting U.S.-Philippines relations as the equivalent of Israel’s war in the West Bank and Gaza, the activist claimed that the guerrilla terrorist Left, allies of al-Qaeda, was the islands’ only hope for salvation from American predominance.

He urged solidarity among insurgencies worldwide and activist pressure on certain groups in America, a country that he called a "white settler society like Israel." This trope reappeared throughout the conference. It begs the question: what ethnic groups can possibly be welcome in the United States according to this radical ideology?

He answered such a question by recommending a website to give insight into his version of "social justice." He recommended The International League of People’s Struggle, another revolutionary popular front headed by its New People’s Army’s leader-in-exile, Filipino Jose Maria Sison. By opposing military bases in Mindanao, the website praises the terrorist Moro Islamic Liberation Front, and even the al-Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf, apparently excusing their murders and kidnappings as "legitimate resistance." The ILPS also republishes communiqués from assorted Maoist terror groups, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a member of Arafat’s PLO coalition.

The ILPS "Marxist-Leninist Newswire" featured until recently a winter 2001-2002 statement from the PFLP exhorting world leftist unity with the Islamic and nationalist Intifada: "We have a Red-Green alliance with Hamas. We will genuinely nurture and support this alliance as long as it lasts. Long live the Red-Green Alliance!" It demanded re-conquest "from the river to the sea" the entire land of Israel forbidding a two-state solution and the criticism of Arafat or any other Palestinian revanchists. It called for allied radicals who must "induce defection among the IDF and Israeli citizenry, or the evacuation of the Jewish population, at every possible opportunity. The corollary is that you cannot send Jews to Palestine on any pretext whatsoever." With publications like this, the world Marxist movement represented at this Horace Mann Middle School event revealed its overt anti-Semitism.

Counter-Intelligence or Unintelligence?

The next panelist, an Oakland teacher and black nationalist, spoke on behalf of the "new" Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. Their website asks for an independent "New Afrikan national territory" to be carved out of the "Black Belt South," a notion originally advocated by the American Communist Party in the 1930s and more recently by Louis Farrakhan. The delegate himself did not mention black political secession from the U.S., but issued the usual vague calls to "give the land back to the oppressed peoples." Judging from his solidarity rhetoric, the Malcolm X revivalists have found a trans-mutated ideology combining Islamic, communist and racial separatist language as part of their game plan.

The Oakland teacher went on to discuss three groups that he claimed the American government had successfully targeted since September 11, 2001. He explained first and foremost his regret at the loss of power by American radicals from the 1960s and 1970s, thus betraying the conference’s self-obsessed nostalgia for paramilitaries like the Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground, all violent groups. Second, according to this same speaker, African American Muslim groups have been so swamped with converts that they now fear informants and infiltrators within. His third example was a bizarre allegation that the wars on drugs, street gangs and narco-terrorists in the U.S. were launched to not only defeat guerrillas abroad, but intended to prevent African American rebellion by imprisoning or killing large numbers of able-bodied black youth. The worst of it all, he argued, was that the American establishment thus devastates each coming generation of "the movement." In other words, he explained to the eager attendees, his failed revolutionary politics in the U.S. were due to our government’s fighting drug addiction and crime. This man teaches children in Oakland.

As the first two speakers spun conspiracy theories and extremist analogies, I noticed a silent older radical eyeing me suspiciously. Throughout the workshop, he would gradually move to the seat next to me and lean over my shoulder, looking at my notepad, then move away before beginning his surveillance again. During a Marxist cult meeting inside, it was apparently necessary to patrol for thought crimes. Later in the main auditorium, other socialist comrades would do the same thing to me conspicuously and quietly. The "Big Brother" mentality did not fall with the Soviet Union as it was alive and well at this conference.

Blaming Iraqi Terrorism on the U.S. and Capitalism

Next speaking in a workshop was an Iraqi-American panelist "active in the Oakland community." He stated that Americans had "absolutely planned" the lawlessness and instability of post-invasion Iraq. This "war of philosophical interest to the United States is a deliberate attempt to set back a people for generations," he lectured. In his paranoid mindset, America fabricates its own enemy combatants in order to complicate and prolong the occupation at its own expense. He imagined that the United States is so powerful that it can dictate not only all social conditions in the Middle East, but even the flaws of individual Arabs who kill American soldiers.

As an Iraqi émigré, he labeled Saddam Hussein a criminal tyrant, but then praised Ba’athist Party economic nationalism for keeping a government oil monopoly in Iraq and blocking imports from Syria. A propos to the conference, he praised both regimes for refusing to go the way of Jordan and Egypt toward détente with Israel, and thus forming a capitalist partnership with the U.S. He also despised what he termed Saudi Arabia’s betrayal of the Intifada for American petrodollars. This struck me as his being divorced from reality; how could Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabbi state ideology, its refusal to recognize Israel and sponsorship of Palestinian terrorism, strike him as compromise? He then urged a boycott of Israeli exports and international divestment of the Jewish state, and also wished the Iraqi insurgents well against the American military.

From Front to Back

In the grand tradition of united communist front groups, these first few panelists were only the warm-up acts on particular radical issues presented with a veneer of civility. The more overt communists usually follow—and the Justice in Palestine Coalition’s "Targets of Empire" workshop did not disappoint anyone in attendance seeking revolution.

The first two younger male panelists exuded a self-conscious hip-hop attitude and slang—bad boys selling the new radical chic. It struck me that this subversion of language is a low art-form, an effective outreach trick to ensnare the naïve, the romantic and the paranoid "peace at any cost" individuals into the service of radical socialists; communism for the MTV generation.

They do this by setting up activist terminology, agenda, organizations and events, through a vanguard of partisans, who may then insert more explicit communist appeals as a hidden message. Although some of the Baby Boomer activists made an agonizing attempt to remain hip in this workshop, the middle-aged organizers fell back on sloganeering in a pidgin of plain English and Marxist dialect.

The next panelist was a more obvious communist party hack: Gloria La Riva, who also serves as an editor of "Socialism and Liberation Magazine" and who is the head of the San Francisco Chronicle section of the Media Workers Guild/Typographical Union. She mewled with joy about the conference’s collective extremism and gloated over the "victory" against the "Israelis" by referring to when Mr. Kaplan was denied entry, claiming he was "defeated by our solidarity." Mr. Kaplan is not Israeli. The audience sentinel continued to watch me suspiciously as she spoke.

Changing the subject quickly away from "Palestine," La Riva summarized the panel’s previous topics and tied them to explicit goals of Marxist world conquest. Asserting that the black community is the most conscious about injustice and that its major leaders are therefore targets of an oppressive U.S. government, she bemoaned "the set up of Marion Berry," the Washington, D.C. mayor arrested for cocaine possession. La Riva then complained of the "new pretext" used for each new "target" of the American government citing similar criminal prosecutions that are really trivialities as "genocide" or the "oppression of one people."

She voiced fears for the rulers of Sudan, who are currently ethnically cleansing the black communities of the Darfur region by saying this could give the U.S. a pretext to invade that country. She might have added such "pretexts" were set by the United Nations, whose charter forbids genocide and demands enforcement by member states. As a Marxist, she might have even pondered how Sudan shifted from leftist rule to Islamist dictatorship in the last two decades. Fortunately for the Khartoum regime, the U.N. is so compromised by treating Sudan and other rogue states as normal so that the massacres and expulsions often go unchecked. La Riva was an apologist for Islamist genocide despite her claims of being for human rights.

Underscoring her opposition to U.S. intervention against other totalitarian movements committing genocide, she then listed Milosevic’s Serb fascist Yugoslavia as a victim of America. Milosevic’s short-lived and corrupt political machine, like any anti-American rogue state clinging to socialism, obviously deserved her solidarity. She told us how she made pilgrimages to Greater Serbia with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark in 1999. Clark was Saddam Hussein’s attorney prior to the war and is his defense attorney today. His International Action Center and International A.N.S.W.E.R. advocate communist revolution in the United States. Instead of acknowledging Yugoslavia’s criminal project of mass murder and mass expulsion, La Riva pronounced the NATO bombing campaign as "genocide" intended to "destroy a country that is [sic] viable to resist empire."

After these saints among "alternative economic systems," who would Gloria La Riva anoint next? Not just Castro’s communist Cuba, but the imprisoned "Cuban Five," Castro’s spies caught infiltrating militant pro-democracy exile groups in the U.S. She appreciated that three of the convicts had served in the Cuban expedition to prop up the Soviet-line MPLA regime in Angola years before. Ignoring the immense African casualties of that previous Marxist bloodbath, La Riva instead caricatured anti-Castro Cuban American refugees exclusively as the villainous assassins of 3,400 innocent islanders without any real proof. But how many more people have been killed by, jailed by or fled from the current Havana regime? In her "solidarity," she did not bother to wonder about 15,000 killed and the 20,000 refugees who leave each year. Espionage on behalf of a dictatorship that has vowed to overthrow America should be an open and shut case, but to her the five intelligence operatives are innocent martyrs to Castro’s "independence." By cheering enemy states and their spies, these activists have once again shown their cards: they are defeatist, anti-American, totalitarian stooges.

Last but not least, La Riva reminded the room that on January 20th, this secretive Marxist-Leninist coalition will lead a "counter-inaugural" against "whichever pro-Israeli candidate wins the presidential election." Such Marxist movement leadership often tries to hide its fuller intentions, via broad front partnerships that claim to be "peace activists" like Not In Our Name, Code Pink, Global Exchange and United for Peace and Justice. Eventually they get around to showing their resolute anti-liberalism every time. It saddens me greatly that the moderate Left is so indifferent to this "tiny fringe," for that small minority is indeed a pro-terrorist fifth column with revolutionary contempt for the Democratic Party in the United States.

A chorus of planted spokesmen also honored imprisoned Puerto Rican terrorists. The Filipino-American Maoist who spoke earlier also plugged another front party called the Bayan Muna. Richard Becker, a very prominent West Coast leader of the Workers World Party’s International Action Center/A.N.S.W.E.R. then wandered in, and on cue praised Cuba for giving refuge to the 1960s-‘70s American terrorist Left. An Iranian-American in the audience feared that America "may even go along with certain grievances people of certain nationalities may have," and so excuse a confrontation with the Teheran theocracy on behalf of the suffering masses. He obviously didn’t care that the Iranian revolution had purged the Marxists who originally supported it.

This reveals a blind spot for the far Left: militant Islam hates and kills communists also.

Just before the final conference event, I chatted briefly with an Iranian-American named Mazda, who confirmed that the ayatollahs used the mosque to rally mass support that the Marxists had not developed. The Islamic Republic was then able to crush the communists easily by 1981. When I asked if he was with an activist organization, he answered that he was with "ANSWER and PSL." Then someone else hurried him away from me. Just asking a question in this crowd arouses suspicion.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation or PSL, it turns out, publishes the magazine that La Riva and Becker both edit, along with other WWP-ANSWER leaders like Bill Hackwell. The PSL organ was only started in August, 2004. It begs the question: has the entire WWP leadership defected, or merely created a new front? Either way, they have made a confusing alphabet-soup of overlapping front groups, all in attendance at the conference. The re-labeling helps to prevent scrutiny and give every leftist coalition the illusion of greater popularity.

THE "ANTI-WAR" LEFT RALLIES FOR—WAR

Stage Fright

As the auditorium filled, the cadre responsible for coordinating each workshop gave their reports to the assembly. For dramatic effect, each one was given a Palestinian scarf while on stage. A representative of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10, Jack Heyman, boomed that it was "not terrorist" when Palestinians use any form of violence against "Zionist terrorism" (Jews) and "Zionist apartheid." The Israeli shipping firm, Zimline, has boats arriving at the Port of Oakland, and he promised the local ILWU would picket them in solidarity, if asked. Indeed, the union has had a romance with Stalinism dating at least back to the 1930s under Harry Bridges. Heyman went on to lambaste the Democrats, and particularly John Kerry, for approving Israel’s wartime assassination of terrorist leaders like Hamas’ Abdel Aziz Rantisi. The only solution, he argued, would be for the labor movement to leave the party. Presumably the Democrats themselves would never take the first step and shun the Intifada cheerleaders in the ILWU.

Three blander speakers offered platitudes on "saving the children" and how activism unites the Left. They were the warm up acts. Then International A.N.S.W.E.R./WWP/PSL heavyweight Richard Becker took the podium, escalating the discourse to the geopolitical ambitions of all the revolutionaries. An anti-American Middle East, he stated, would deny the U.S. further power over the world. To the benefit of the Iraqi insurgency, Becker added, America’s military has hesitated to occupy hostile cities in the Sunni west and Shi’ite south. As a result the terrorists have freer tactical mobility—a fact celebrated by the head of this supposedly anti-war organization. Maoist Becker closed by repeating the promise to oppose the January 20th presidential inauguration of "whoever wins whatever election, or so-called ‘election.’" He further declared the "bogus nature of elections based on their impact in the Middle East and in the rest of the world."

Throughout all the speeches, the middle-aged cadre continued their clumsy surveillance. As I took notes without rest, my handlers whispered to each other and then rotated in and out of the seats next to me and behind me. I pretended not to notice the Thought Police.

"We are the only ones who shall enjoy it"

The final speaker, Elias Rashmawi of the Al-Awda Palestine Right of Return Coalition, took the stage after his colleague, Becker. Since the outbreak of the new Intifada in 2000, Rashmawi said he had watched the Bay Area solidarity movement grow into a mighty political presence. Palestinian-American radicals who might have once been kept in the background of the Left were now charging into view. "As we stood firm on our right to return, we knew we had a future. Not because we are a resilient people, though we are, but because ours is an existential struggle….That very existence is in defiance of a program called empire!" The Oslo peace process, he added, offered the Palestinians status as "servants of empire, not even junior partners" like the Israelis.

Moving on, Rashmawi inveighed against the United States "that wants all of you so that it might become more powerful….The trigger is pulled from right here. We know where the fire comes from. The people who pull the trigger are the sons of the civil rights movement and Chicanos. That pains us! War is about transforming people, leveraging them into an army." By his definition, anyone fighting American military "leveraging" deserves "international solidarity." Thus the "anti-war" movement reveals itself as pro-war.

"We will impose a total boycott on the state of Israel," Rashmawi continued. "Our vision is a collective march by our people, a march home.Our right to return will not be subject to anyone. Our right to return will not be compromised, will not be spoken about….We are the only ones who will enjoy it!" These euphemisms barely hide their true meaning: the complete removal of five million Israelis by force, annihilating the Jewish state, making another Holocaust.

Rashmawi added that the Palestinians "know that ours is a joint enemy," including Israel, the new Iraqi government and the hated United States. Despite his proud anti-Americanism, he added that "we, like everyone else, belong in this country. We are not guests. Our belonging should not be mistaken as ideological allegiance." Despite loathing America’s history, laws and government, and his open call to aid its enemies abroad in wartime, Rashmawi claimed a constitutional right to being a settler. It is beyond him to see why the Israelis deserve the same privileges in the Holy Land.

"Onward for international solidarity! Onward for a free Palestine! Onward for a free Iraq! No to Iyad Allawi, no to Ghazi al-Yawar, no to Hamid Karzai!" After Rashmawi thundered his conclusion, the room gave him a standing ovation and was led in chanting "Free-Free Pal-estine!" This totalitarian frenzy reminded me again of Orwell, where Big Brother’s party led the "Two Minutes Hate" as a daily ritual.

INTIFADA SOLIDARITY AND ANTI-SEMANTIC PROPAGANDA

The entire event was openly disloyal to not just our current elected leaders but our entire society: run by proselytizing communist parties, bathed in the clichés of anti-Americanism and deliberately advocating a world war against the developed and democratic nations. The organizers and the lion’s share of attendants are socialist revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the United States and its allies, and admittedly welcome any and all partners in doing so. I do not "suspect" these intentions, for they eagerly proclaimed them. The fellow-travelers were welcome according to plan; Lenin called them "useful idiots." In a layered front group partnership, the pacifists and sentimental activists are the useful idiots of the American Marxist-Leninists, who are in turn the dupes of terrorists abroad.

In my observation of the conference’s final four hours, there was no willfully explicit language against "Jews." A euphemism of "Zionists" masks any anti-Semitic remark. It is only a tragic but banal coincidence that many among the self-appointed vanguard had Jewish heritage that they abandoned for the new god of totalitarian socialism. After all, the whole day was dedicated to the destruction of Israel, categorically despising its very presence on this earth. The festival strained for an equal-opportunity offensive against private enterprise, non-revolutionary democracy and U.S. geopolitics, but their insistent and absolute rejection of the "Zionist" (Jewish) democracy’s right to exist as an island in a sea of Muslim dictatorships was the celebration’s raison d’etre.

Anti-Semitism in its left-wing socialist version still deserves that label. It still endorses Palestinian absolutism. It still advocates expelling the Israelis from the Middle East by means of war and terrorism. It still judges not merely the Israeli state, but its entire Jewish society as an unjustifiable affront to local Arabs and the entire world alike. In the conference’s refrain repeated ad nauseam, any and all "resistance" is warranted in the struggle to overthrow Zionism and oust the resident Israelis. All Arab bigotry, Arab authoritarianism and Arab-committed atrocities were not only forgiven at this event, but tacitly encouraged as exemplary forms of "struggle." The Intifada sympathizers did not ask their heroes to compromise with Israel and its five million Jews in any way, both being defined as alien invaders.

The message at this conference was intended to guarantee the outcome of a triumphant Palestinian revolution that would be a nationalist massacre: the ethnic cleansing of Jews. If allowed, the elimination of Israeli society by force--the desired victory--would be genocidal. The Marxists and fellow travelers at Horace Mann Middle School, however, did not call it genocide. They called it "all forms of resistance" against "the imperial rule" of "Zionist apartheid settlers" and on behalf of "the right of return for all Palestinians." Do not be fooled: the only tangible result of these stated objectives would be the mass murder of all but those Israelis who managed to escape. The invading Arab paramilitary would not take the time to build camps.

A San Francisco public school was used this time to recruit for the International Solidarity Movement, the global civilian arm of Palestinian genocidal ambitions, at a heinous propaganda festival. The terrorists have a propaganda brigade at the head of the American anti-war movement, and they have a following that is seeking to recruit and raise funds for terrorists overseas. Americans need to know about and understand these conferences and why they do not belong at taxpayer-supported facilities, especially during the War on Terror.

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